


the public explanation

by elizajane



Series: On the Strength of the Evidence [2]
Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: Consensual Infidelity, F/F, Female Friendship, Femslash, Multi, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 07:51:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7524529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thank you to Kivrin and Crowgirl for the thoughtful beta. The suggestions you made that were not worked into this piece have been taken under advisement for later installments.</p>
    </blockquote>





	the public explanation

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Kivrin and Crowgirl for the thoughtful beta. The suggestions you made that were not worked into this piece have been taken under advisement for later installments.

The evening is pleasant for cycling and Cathy arrives at Dee and Nora’s flat in good time. She leaves her bicycle with the others in the courtyard of their brick building, and nods to the porter on her way to the stairs that lead to their third floor walk-up.

They’ve left the door on the latch, so she steps inside and slips out of her flats to pad in stocking feet into the sitting room where she can already hear the familiar murmur of female voices. As she always does on these evenings, Cathy begins to breathe a little easier just by virtue of being in this space among these people. _Your girls_ , Geordie calls them, affectionately. _You look tired, love,_ he’ll say to her. _You should go spend some time with the girls. I’ll look after the kids. Stay the night with Caroline._

“Cath,” Dee looks up in welcome from where she’s pouring drinks at the sideboard. “Your usual gin and tonic?”

“Please,” she says, gratefully accepting the drink Dee proffers. Glass in hand, Cathy crosses the tidy sitting room to the settee where Caroline is already settled with her feet up on the faded green ottoman. She bends over the arm to press a _hello_ kiss against Caro’s lips before stepping over Caro’s legs to take a seat in the opposite corner. Caro smiles against Cathy's mouth, though her hands don’t stop twisting and knitting the wool she’s working into a sweater. It’s the same project she had brought with her the week before -- a green cabled Aran for a nephew currently at school up in Edinburgh.

“Darling,” she says, by way of greeting. “Glad you could come.”

“It was a lovely evening for a bicycle ride,” Cathy agrees, settling against the arm of the settee and tucking her stockinged feet up under Caro’s thigh. Caro reaches out, absently, between stitches, and slides a cool hand up beneath Cathy’s trouser leg, to the warm hollow behind Cathy’s knee. They speak on the telephone daily, but there are certain things one can never express on a party exchange -- and no amount of conversation can replace the casual intimacy of touch.

“Geordie’s keeping an eye on the children,” Cathy says, anticipating Caro’s question. “And if he’s called away Ruth next door knows to look in on them.”

In truth, she knows that Geordie will have already put his head in at the Tysons to ask would Ruth keep an ear out for the children while he’s out. He’ll have gone round to the vicarage to answer that question of his. She hopes the answer he finds there suits him. She suspects it will, and she’s always had a better sense of these things than Geordie has for all _he’s_ the detective. Possibly because she lets herself hope, for his sake, that someday he’ll find someone who suits him as well as Caroline suits her.

He’s always had poor luck, has their Geordie. Men who weren’t interested, or were interested but only in the physical, or were interested until it became inconvenient to be, or until someone else turned their head. During the war she and Caro nursed him through enough painful disappointments that around the time Esme was born he’d stopped looking altogether.

It’s obvious that Geordie is lonely, but in the past year or two whenever she’s brought it up he protests that life with her and Caro and the children is enough; that men are a bad bet anyway; that his work makes it imprudent to seek out the relationships Cathy can see he still yearns for. It breaks her heart. Particularly so when Caro is visiting Grantchester and Cathy feels the way Geordie pulls back ever so slightly, respecting what she and Caro share between them. They never wanted this for him, for that part of who he is to go so undernourished. But she thinks the dishy vicar -- Sidney, who makes Geordie’s face light with interest and attention and a new layer of longing -- might, just might, be the right man for the job.

 _He’s not interested, not that way_ , Geordie had said to her on their walk home from the river.

 _Bollocks_ , Cathy had said, leaning into his shoulder. _The way he looks at you is_ not _the way of man who isn’t interested._

 _You’re terrible._ He’d kissed her temple, companionably. _He’s still hung up on that girl of his. And if not Amanda then there’s Hildegard. He still gets regular letters from Berlin, you know._

 _You’ve snooped! I knew it!_ Cathy had elbowed him gently in the ribs.

 _I didn’t say I wasn’t …_ Geordie had sighed. _I didn’t say I wasn’t … curious. But I don’t want to put you and Caroline and the children in a -- it makes our family vulnerable. And I don’t want to risk losing him as a … as a friend._ He doesn’t have to add that Sidney’s friendship makes this uniquely terrifying -- that he’s never imagined he’d be in this position. Of having a genuine friend and wanting something … more.

 _And what I’m_ _telling you,_ She'd said, _is you won’t be losing a friend._   _You’ll be gaining a lover. But it’ll have to be you does the asking. Because he’ll respect that you’re a married man, Geordie, and he’s no reason to know it’s different with us. Unless you tell him._

He’d gone quiet after that, but she’d known he was thinking. And when they’d gotten the children to bed and she’d gone about collecting her overnight things she could feel him still thinking, and known what the set of his shoulders meant by way of future action.

The wireless plays in the background as Dee and Nora settle into their accustomed armchairs, Dee with the cat and a crossword, Nora with her cross-stitch. Cathy has brought her own sewing -- a new summer frock for Esme, a shirt of Geordie’s that needs mending -- in the worn carpet bag that had been a present from Geordie’s mother during the war. But she’s content for now with idle hands. She spends so much of her day, particularly in summertime, wrangling their brood and keeping the Keating household in more or less respectable order. It is a luxury to gather here among friends who know her outside her identity as a wife and mother, who understand that isn’t all she is.

Aunt Caro is, of course, known to the children and frequents their home on weekends and between term time. A lecturer in chemistry at Canterbury College, Caro’s spinster status is well established and her adoption into the Keating household easy to explain in terms that won’t endanger her reputation: _school friends -- billeted together during the war -- like a sister to me -- helps so with the children, four being such a handful at times particularly when they were younger -- Geordie’s hours are so unpredictable, after all_. In truth, Geordie had always been a demonstrative father, comfortable with the babes and generous in his affections and time as the children grew older. But he had also, when they first married, been a man diligently working to build a career that would support (however frugally) the family they both wanted. And Caro had been there for them from the beginning -- before the beginning -- with both time and occasionally money to help their slightly unorthodox family come together and thrive.

“Geordie says I should stay over,” Cathy says to Caroline, now, taking a sip of her drink and feeling the burn of the gin at the back of her throat. “Though I’d have to leave by seven tomorrow morning so he can get to the office.” She usually stays the night on “sewing circle” evenings so as not to cycle back in the dark.

Well, that’s the public explanation.

“Up with the birds,” Caro says lightly. “I’ll take you down river in the morning -- I’m not needed at college now that the students have gone on holiday, and the paper I’m working on I could bring with me.”

“You know the children won’t let you have a moment’s peace to write.”

Caro laughs. “You’ve caught me out. No, it’s true. But I haven’t been in over a month between that conference in London and all that marking. They’ll be in danger of forgetting my face.”

“Well, you know you’re always welcome.”

* * *

Caro -- the eccentric heiress with a Doctorate in chemistry and a past that includes several years of government service that will remain a state secret in perpetuity -- lives in a houseboat on the river Cam. Together, a little before midnight, Cathy and Caro give their best to Dee and Nora and walk Cathy’s bicycle back to where the boat is moored at the pavement’s edge. Between leaving the flat and arriving at Caro’s, they refrain from touching at all by long-established habit. But the moment they’re inside, with the curtains drawn, they have their own private sanctuary in which to make up for all the hours they must keep apart.

Cathy leans into Caro’s touch as Caro unbuttons her trousers and pushes them down over Cathy’s hips, made broad by the strain of four pregnancies. Caro herself is fumbling with the drapey blouse and bohemian skirts Caro favors as her summer garb.

“I think,” Cathy says, having saved the news until she and Caroline are alone, “that Geordie’s finally found someone.”

“Oh? As in, someone who won’t break his heart?” Caro arches a skeptical eyebrow. Caro has always been more sharply critical of Geordie’s lovers than Cathy has had the heart to be. To be fair, it had been Caro who witnessed the worst of the Nicholas Kingsley period during the war, and been there to mop Geordie up in the aftermath. Perhaps if Cathy had known Geordie then -- Caroline hadn’t introduced them until four months after Kingsley had dropped Geordie for that American -- she’d be as wary as Caro of a repeat performance.

“As in,” Cathy confirms between kisses. “Do you remember the dishy vicar I pointed out to you in the churchyard? The one who helped that German widow, and keeps finding excuses to put himself in Geordie’s path?”

Caro laughs, pulling Cathy back into the bed just big enough for two that’s set back against the gunwale. “He’s never fallen for a man of the cloth!”

Cathy nods, settling astride Caro’s hips with a contented sigh and bending over to press familiar kisses on her much-beloved face. “And what’s more I say the dishy vicar has fallen for him. He’s kind and he’s smart and he’s everything we could hope for our Geordie to have. You’ll see what I mean when you meet him yourself.”

“Then I am _definitely_ taking you home in the morning.”


End file.
